A lot of ill-planned money is set to go down the drain giving a heavy blow to the provincial health sector as the Chief Minister’s (CM) Secretariat has taken the finance and planning from the health department presumably to please the parliamentarians before the next elections, Pakistan Today has learnt.
Sources on good authority in the Planning and Development (P&D) Department revealed that the health department had proposed around 30 new schemes in the ongoing fiscal year after months of intense and complicated planning. However, officers in the CM Secretariat directed the P&D to cut down the number of schemes to five, also re-prioritising the finances allocated, putting the entire effort of the health planners to ruins. This year’s Annual Development Plan (ADP) further reflects that a major chunk of Rs 4.6 billion of the health’s development budget has been put in a block, which the officials say, is totally on the CM’s “discretion” and the department has no authority to “touch” these funds.
As per the rules, any development scheme emanates from the district and is first whetted by the health department, then the P&D, and only then it is approved considering all the financial outlay and health priorities. Other than the P&D, the health department also has a planning wing to monitor ongoing development schemes and propose new ones. However, the current decision by those at the helm of affairs has put the entire procedure to jeopardy, halting “crucial” healthcare projects’ spending money on “political schemes” to please parliamentarians before the next general elections.
As per details, the surgical tower of Mayo Hospital, various schemes of children hospital, Lahore General Hospital, the Wazirabad and Rawalpindi institutes of cardiology are but only a few important schemes that have been hanging in the balance for past many years, but instead of completing these schemes as proposed by the health department, the CM has announced hospitals in the provincial metropolitan, at the cost of many other major cities and towns in the province, just to please the parliamentarians, wasting public money owing to lack of planning or straightforward ill-planning.
A senior official seeking anonymity said the surgical tower of Mayo Hospital was supposed to get Rs 850 million, but the authorities have released only Rs five million for it. “The same goes true for other schemes as well, which have been pending for past many years, with their cost tripling over time, while the government has not only by-passed the entire procedure but has put it upside down: now the CM secretariat sends direction to the department to prepare the PC-1 of a scheme and send it back after approving, without any input on the efficacy of the scheme,” the official added.
Another official said the CM Secretariat has recently issued directions to the health department re-appropriating Rs 800 million from the already slim development funds allocated for these schemes for Shahdara Hospital, which the CM was to announce. “This is gross wastefulness of public resources and an injustice to the poor people, who mostly rely on public health facilities. Health and education sectors should be clean of dirty politics, but they are not,” he added.
CM’s Special Assistant on Health Khwaja Salman Rafique however said the block allocation had been earmarked for “need-based” projects and was at the CM’s discretion. “I will check the status of the surgical tower at Mayo Hospital because the government intends to complete it…Shahdara Hospital is being built to cater to patients coming from far flung districts to avoid rush in big hospitals in Lahore,” he added. To a question he said all that exercise and re-appropriation was being done because of financial strain.
CM is a planner now as well
